Reading to Children

Her essay makes me think of my own mother who has been reading books from our family library to neighbourhood children for years and of some of the challenges she finds in reading American and British books to children in Nigeria, since when there are so few children’s books written for Nigerian children. Fortunately, there […]

Her essay makes me think of my own mother who has been reading books from our family library to neighbourhood children for years and of some of the challenges she finds in reading American and British books to children in Nigeria, since when there are so few children’s books written for Nigerian children. Fortunately, there are some institutions like the Golden Baobab Prize based in Ghana that are trying to encourage the production of children’s literature in Africa, and publishers like Cassava Republic, who see it as one of their missions to promote African children’s books. Unfortunately, as Jeremy Weate, one of the publishers at Cassava Republic, and Chief Operating Officer Eghosa Imasuen at Kachifo Publishers have recently pointed out, Nigerian publishers are now facing great difficulties due to the February imposition of a 62.5% import tariff on books. There has been no parallel lifting of the duty on paper or machinery to make local printing more affordable. The tariff not only restricts children’s books from the rest of Africa and the world from being imported into the country at affordable prices or even donations but also affects local publishers who use affordable printers in Asia in order to compete with Western publishers. In the meantime, volunteers like Prof. Ugbabe and my mother make do with the books they have.  -Carmen
Kanchana Ugbabe

They had never been read to before, only asked to recite after the teacher, memorize sentences, and copy what is on the blackboard. Reading to my own children even when they were babies and toddlers had yielded results. They learnt to love books, turn the pages with their little fingers, listen to the sounds of words and funny rhymes, and take a book with them wherever they went. Using the library came naturally to them in school. They learnt the discipline of borrowing books from the school library and returning them on time. They had been given the golden key to discover the world and they used it to advantage. As a result of the reading habit, they write extremely well and are equipped to navigate their way through the world.
I volunteered to read to children in a local elementary school once a week. I selected the books and showed up in the classroom at the appointed hour. The children stood up politely and welcomed me in a sing-song recitation. The books my children had loved as three to five-year olds were still with me. They were culturally remote, set in England and North America, and so what? I read The Tiger who came to Tea by Judith Kerr.  I glossed over the ‘milkman who delivered the milk’, ‘the boy from the grocery store’; I changed ‘muffins’ to ‘biscuits’, ‘water in the taps’ (since most of these children do not have running water in their homes) to ‘water in buckets’. The tiger was a friendly Big Cat. He ate all the ‘rice and stew’, bread and biscuits, and drank all the tea and the water, said goodbye to Sophie and her mother and left the house. The children crowded around me to see the pictures. They were thrilled to be told that this tiger was not fierce, didn’t live in the jungle, but knocked on the door ‘Kpam Kpam’ of the suburban house and walked in to share a meal with Sophie and her mother. And he was polite too, with his ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’. The story was a big hit with the children.
I ran into trouble with the book about Lucy the Ladybird. But we overcame it by turning the Ladybird into a ‘bug’, something like a cockroach. The Very Hungry Caterpillar went down well, particularly as the book had these gaping holes the hungry caterpillar had dug into, apples, pears, strawberries, watermelons etc. I had captured their imagination and now I could improvise as I went along.  The Hungry Caterpillar wormed its way through ‘meat pies, puff puff, and kosai’.  I had miniature picture books I distributed to them to turn the pages and have fun before collecting them all back. I wanted to read to them about their everyday experiences but there were no Nigerian/African children’s books that told good stories ( for this age group) and had good illustrations in colour to hold their attention. The only suitable book I found was Mayawo and the Masquerade by Lola Shoneyin (Cassava Republic, 2010), where Mayawo who is so used to computer games gets taken to the village by his mother. There he accompanies his cousin to see the masquerade and thoroughly enjoys himself in the process. It was a story the children could identify with. Only bread for Eze by Ifeoma Okoye (Fourth Dimension/Farafina, 1980) is punitive in that the child is punished with an excessive diet of bread since he has trouble eating wholesome food like cornmeal tuwo, rice, and moin-moin. The moral lesson is hammered in, in a somewhat unsympathetic manner. My husband downloaded children’s stories accompanied by music and movement on my iPad to give the children an added dimension to their ‘reading’ experience. It is indeed a challenge to Nigerian App developers to team up with writers of children’s books to produce culturally appropriate Apps for children.
The black writer, Walter Dean Myers in an article in The New York Times laments that in all the books he read as a child, he did not recognize himself. There was no validation of his experience as a black child in a predominantly white society. The books were about white children, presumably, in secure suburban homes celebrating Christmas and birthdays with two loving and doting parents. There were no single parent families, there was no ghetto in the stories, nor was there any reference to black children in the neighbourhood.  ‘Books transmit values,’ Myers writes, ‘they explore our common humanity.’ Chinua Achebe too experienced this absence of African stories by Africans when he was given Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary to read at the university in the 1950’s and was told they were novels about his country and continent! The remedy, Achebe decided was for Africans to write their own stories.
Some writers maintain that the magic and enchantment of children’s stories are just a veneer and that beneath it lurks a subtext of hidden messages. Hephzibah Anderson (NYT 2014) unravels the mystery and identifies serious adult themes at the heart of popular children’s books, classics, and fairy tales. Adults may read in the lovable Paddington Bear books, the allegory of immigration; The Very Hungry Caterpillar yields up capitalist and consumerist interpretations; psychoanalytical readings of The Tiger who came to Tea turns the delightful children’s story on its head. Cinderella and Snow White we are told enable children to learn about good and evil, and address unspoken fears and desires that they experience in real life.
This week I have chosen a Dr Seuss book to read to the children in my class. In it Mr Brown goes ‘moo moo’ like a cow, ‘hoo hoo’ like an owl, ‘sizzle sizzle’ like a fried egg, ‘drizzle drizzle’ like rain drops, and ‘buzz buzz’ like a bee. He makes many other sounds and follows up each with a question, ‘How about you?’ inviting the children to repeat the sounds. It is going to be a noisy class but the children will love it I am sure. They may learn to listen to the sounds around them, they may attempt to pronounce certain strange words. The ‘layered meanings’, if there are any, will certainly escape them. But then they have a lifetime to learn about corruption, greed, rivalry, acquisitiveness, ethnicity, and hypocrisy, and many other charming things that adult life and literature places in our midst. At this age, when they are three to five-year-olds I want them to enjoy the ‘feel’ of books and develop the reading habit and the culture of reading which will give them joy and innumerable benefits in later life.